


When You're Gone

by tekhnicolor



Series: The Ficlet Universe [5]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 12:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3692457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tekhnicolor/pseuds/tekhnicolor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after Idiot’s Lantern, the Doctor’s acting strange and Rose tries to figure out what’s wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You're Gone

**Author's Note:**

> I should really just give up trying to right straight fluff. It’s just not happening! *cries*

It was just after London, 1953, when Rose had nearly lost her face and the Doctor had nearly lost her. She'd tried to fall asleep, she really had, but the Doctor had been tinkering away in the console room for the past five hours, which meant he was worried, or frustrated, or afraid. And none of those things were especially good.

It also broke her heart a little whenever he was in even the slightest amount of pain, and anyone knows it's hard to sleep with a breaking heart.

She checked her bedside clock — it was five minutes 'til 3:00am, not that that meant much on board the TARDIS, but still, blimey — and wrapped up in her dressing gown, remembering how cold the console room could get since the Doctor rarely paid much attention to any non-drastic temperature change. Then she cracked her door open, and stepped outside.

She couldn't see him, but she could hear him still, banging away furiously underneath the console, and she felt nervous suddenly, like she didn't know what to say to help him. Maybe she should just go back to bed. She didn't even know what was the matter — she only  _assumed_  it had something to do with today's events, but then, he had seemed fine earlier — and even if she did, he wasn't really one to take advice. Not that she had any to give. But maybe … maybe he just needed company. He’d never admit it of course, but everyone did now and then, didn’t they? Everyone needed a hand to hold.

She hopped lightly up into the captain’s chair, but the Doctor must have heard the noise because only seconds later his head and torso emerged from his concealed workspace.

His shirtsleeves were rolled up at the elbows, his hair was a delicious – no, Rose, _stop_ – a regular, nothing-to-look-at, innocuous mess atop his head, and his face and glasses, as well as his shirt, were covered in black grease.

“How d’you even see through those things?” She tapped her temple a couple of times to indicate the glasses. She tried to sound lighthearted, but she kept her voice low. She didn’t know why, but it was sort of nighttime and for some reason it seemed appropriate.

At first, he only watched her, a curious expression which looked something like relief hovering about his face, but then his body seemed to sag and he sighed, removing his glasses and tugging out his shirttails to wipe them with.

Now that – that was just bloody _unfair._

“You should go to bed,” he said, but his voice sounded tired.

She chewed worriedly on a fingernail. “Couldn’t,” she said. “Not with you makin’ all that racket.” She nodded towards the console.

He laughed a little, and raked a hand through his _perfectly-average_ hair until he looked a proper Einstein. “In my defense,” he said, pointing his glasses at her. “’Making a racket’ is kind of what we do. Just a bit.”

There was a long pause, until she ventured to ask, “Are you okay?”

The half-smile that had appeared earlier melted off his face, and he rubbed at his eyes with the heels at his hands. Scooting himself the rest of the way out from under the console, he stood up and, when he couldn’t find a towel to wipe his hands with, proceeded to rub the tar off them with his shirt. The entire front side was practically covered in tar now, Rose noticed. He really shouldn’t keep wearing it. It was bound to have some … germs or something that were unhealthy, even to – _stop._ She had come to see if she could make him feel any better, not fawn over him like a child. Though if making him feel better involved snogging him thoroughly, she couldn’t say she was opposed to it. This new incarnation had been touchy and flirty since the beginning, and not being able to tell if it meant something or if it was just how he acted with every female companion he brought aboard his ship was starting to drive her up a wall. If they spent one more day on some empty beach on a planet with six moons, while he pointed stars out to her like a bloody romantic and then refused to talk about it the next day, she was going to –

“I’m fine, brilliant. Thanks.” The blatantness of his lie brought her back to the present. Because that’s what it was: a _lie_. She might not be the cleverest of the human “apes,” but she knew pain when she saw it. And she knew him.

“Then why,” she began, scurrying from the captain's seat to follow him as he trudged off down the hall, “are you pouting?”

“I am not –“ He turned around to face her, walking backwards a few steps as she followed astutely, hands behind her back. Then he groaned and turned back around. Finally he turned into the library, stretching himself out on the couch and looking up at her pointedly. “I am _not_ pouting,” he said firmly. “Time Lords do not pout.”

She plopped down next to him. “You must be somethin’ else then.” She squished the skin on his forehead, and he immediately turned away. Well. That wasn't a good sign. Usually, even on days when something troubled him, he was more playful than this. She kept going anyway. “Not Slitheen,” she decided. “An’ you’re too skinny to be a Werewolf.”

He didn’t say ‘ _oi_ ,’ and that worried her.

“’Kay,” she said finally, letting out a breath. “I dunno what’s wrong with you today, an’ I know you probably don’t want any company. But I do. So I’m staying.” She could be stubborn too.

She pulled a blanket from off the center table and laid it over her legs. It would be awkward, if he kept up this not-talking-to-her thing, and it would likely also get uncomfortable, since she was sitting on the edge of the couch and couldn’t lean back, being that he was lying behind her. But she didn’t want to leave him like this. And so she stayed.

~

He didn’t say anything for the next hour and a half, and at last she thought he must have fallen asleep. Sighing, she stood from the couch and turned to him. He definitely looked asleep, and he was still a disaster, clothes wrinkled and covered in dark grease, and still wearing his trainers. A big chocolate-y disaster, that’s what he was. It reminded her of a little boy who'd come home late and had been too tired to make it all the way to his bedroom before collapsing on the sofa. 

Deciding it was best to go to bed and try to talk to him again in the morning, she draped the blanket she had been using over his lanky frame and turned to leave. There wasn’t really a night and day on board the TARDIS, but according to her sleep schedule, it was nearing 5:00 am, and she _was_ exhausted from the day’s events. A shiver coursed through her at the memory of her face, gone. That was not an experience she ever wanted to relive, even if –

A hand caught her arm.

She jumped, still on edge though she knew it was the Doctor, and turned to find him watching her from under a mop of thoroughly disheveled hair.

“That’s my job,” he said, nodding at the blanket she’d laid over him.

She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t. Like a film reel in the back of her mind played all the times the Doctor had ever laid a blanket over her in the cold, or covered her with his long coat, or tucked her in and told her stories when they were far away from home and she was in too much of a frenzy to sleep.

She sat back down on the edge of the couch, toying with her fingers in her lap and trying to hide the furious blush she was sure had begun to bloom across her face, when she finally found words.

“You have to let me take care of you sometimes,” she said, quietly.

The TARDIS whirred dreamily. 

He was silent for a long while, and she was almost ready to get up and leave again when she felt his hands suddenly at her waist.

“C’mere,” he said, and she gasped as he pulled her down to him, tucking her head under his chin and draping the blanket over the both of them. In the semi-darkness, she could just barely make out the concerned look on his face.

“You okay?” she asked a second time. It wasn’t something they did – talk about feelings – but it was something she _wanted_ to do. With him.

After a moment, he breathed out, rustling the hairs on the top of her head. Suppressing the shiver that came next was impossibly hard.

“What do I do,” he asked, his voice whisper-soft, “when you’re gone?”

The room was so quiet she was sure he could hear the sound of her heart breaking. What would he do? She had always assumed – though she’d secretly, and probably selfishly, hoped the opposite – that he’d be fine, that he’d go off on new adventures with new people, that he’d move on, just like he always did, that he’d find someone else and forget all about her in a heartbeat.

Apparently it had been a while since he’d last asked his question, because he shifted anxiously and spoke again.

“I’ll lose you.” It was the barest of whispers. “I always do. Lose people, that is. Quite good at that, me. I must have holes in my pockets! And it’s never okay, not really, but …”

He trailed off, and she held her breath.

When he said nothing else, she asked, “’But’ what, Doctor?”

He buried his face in her hair. His voice was muffled. She could barely make out the words.

_“But I really don’t want to lose you.”_

Something inside of her shattered.

She was certain that those eight words hurt more than anything else she had ever felt in all her life, but it was a unique pain, a bittersweet, beautiful, heavy, rainy-day sort of pain that made her heart ache in the cavity of her chest. She loved him. Now she knew she did. Because his sadness was her sadness, and when his heart broke, she felt the crack through hers.

Was it really so impossible to think that he loved her back?

She fisted handfuls of his shirt and pressed herself closer to him, as if there were some magical way to make two people become one and this was it. “You won’t lose me,” she said fiercely. “Not even if I’m gone, you won’t lose me. I’ll be here.”

“Promise?”

She nodded. “Promise.” Then she smiled a little, pulling back to look at him. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his hair drooped sadly. “Just don’t keep me in your pockets,” she quipped, ruffling his hair bravely. She smiled and poked her tongue to the corner of her mouth, this time unable to hold back the shiver that came when his eyes flicked to her lips.

“Mm,” he hummed, twisting his fingers absently through the hair at the nape of her neck. “Then where should I keep you?” He bumped noses with her, a faint smile beginning to form on his face.

Okay, that was well past enough. She was impatient, and very much done with his teasing. What the man needed was a good proper snog.

But his smile was so pretty, and his eyes were so bright now, even in the dark, sparkling with what she hoped weren’t tears, and when he touched her it felt like lightning – bolts of white fire that buzzed beneath her skin and make her blood tingle.

And before anything else, she knew now what she wanted him to know.

“When I’m gone,” she started, swallowing, “here.” She drew one of his hands from behind her back, holding it shakily between their bodies. “Hold hands. All the time, with all the people you care about. That’s what you’ve got to do. Keep doin’ that an’ don’t let go. Got it? That’s the secret. That’s how you can remember me. ‘Kay?”

He smiled, and leaned in, and kissed her, and out of all the strange things she’d experienced on their travels, this was by far the strangest. And the most beautiful.

Afterwards he kept his eyes closed, and hummed her name a little like a song, and she fell asleep to the feeling of weightlessness, of hanging suspended in his arms, like a constellation dangling easily from the nighttime sky.

“I love you,” she mumbled into his chest, just before dreams took her.

He kissed her head, and it wasn’t until many minutes had passed that he whispered back to her,

_“Quite right too.”_

~

And he hopes she hears him, hopes she knows what he means when he says those words, because he’ll say them again one day, in another world, another universe, and they’ll be all she has to hold onto.

 

* * *

 

_(I’m sorry, but you were just the boy who loved too much for the universe to understand.)_


End file.
